Brand Central Station

By: Andrew Eisner, Retrevo.com’s Director of Community and Content

Everyone is talking about the mobile Internet and how more and more consumers are browsing and using lots of apps anywhere they and their mobile phones happen to be. Are cell phone owners also becoming more comfortable buying things with their phones? If not, what would make them more likely to shop with their phones? This Retrevo Pulse Study looked at consumers and mobile commerce and found many willing shoppers ready to make purchases with their phones.

Consumers Are Warming to Mobile Commerce
In February of 2010, a Retrevo Pulse studyfound almost 10% of the respondents indicating they had purchased something with their cell phones. Four months later, with a different sample, that number had doubled to 20%. The bad news is that a little less than half the respondents have never purchased anything with their phone and have no plans to do so in the future. The better news is the 27% that haven’t bought anything yet but indicate they will in the future. That leaves about 20% who purchased something through their phone.

Apps Make Shopping Easier
Apps make everything so much easier and more fun, and that includes shopping. Retrevo found that nearly 42% of those who have shopped with their phones said they have used apps to make purchases. When we looked at gender and smartphone owners we weren’t surprised to see male mobile shoppers outnumbering females and iPhone owners leading the pack.

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Intersting news breaking this week about the use of mobile phones in the US.  Apparently, like much of the rest of the world, a majority of Americans now carry their cell phones with them “at all times” – even inside their homes.  This coming from a study released this week by Knowledge Networks.

In other parts of the world, where the hard wiring required for phones for the past 100 years ran up against ancient buildings, incredibly dense populations or remote locations, mobile phones were often adopted as the appliance of choice for people who wanted to stay in touch.  The distribution of phones in countries like Japan and Germany lead phone companies in those countries to adopt a later, more versatile standard for mobile communications – resulting in an explosion of SMS and other mobile communications streams.

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This article of the MarketingVOX blog caught my attention last week. Specifically this bit:

“Some 3-5 percent of phone users click on banner ads on their screens – higher than the 1 percent click rate of computer users, according to Jeff Janer, chief operating officer of Third Screen Media.”

If Sprint Nextel and Verizon are getting into bed with Yahoo! and other search companies, then what does that mean for the independent phone directory people? More importantly, how are small and medium-sized businesses going to be able to take advantage of this technology on a local scale?

The benefits of this technology are pretty obvious: more precise targeting and a rich database on customers broken down by phone number. It’s a database marketers dream come true, isn’t it? The real question is how will consumers react.

Our prediction: If the mobile phone companies stumble by streaming tons of unwanted, irrelevant crap over their customers’ phones, we’re looking at the next generation of spam. On the other hand, if revenues generated by advertising are used to reduce (or eliminate) the cost of the phone service and the content is accurately delivered (relevant), consumers may consider ad content to be a product benefit.

This Wall Street Journal article has more info.